Employment and a dearth of creativity

That's right, I said dearth.  I may be gainfully employed and neglectful of my blog, my I remember one or two words from the SATs.

My SAT scores came up again recently.  Now that I've settled into New York life -- that's right, she's the mistress that skillfully seduced me away from you, my reader(s) -- I'm going to uproot myself once again and head down what will *hopefully* be a path to a career, a steady income, and stability.  In the U.K.

Why couldn't I just stay here in New York, you might ask, keep the rather fun job I already have, and actually wake from my creativity coma?  It's New York.  I could be out at open mics, writing for blogs, and generally promoting myself at least as much as I do Broadway Shows for a living.  I could stop making excuses about this being a temporary situation -- which it is.

And that's where the SAT scores come in.  I submitted them -- along with three generations of birth certificates, three months of bank statements, my resume, repeated pleas for mercy and assurances of my employability -- to the British Consulate General of New York.  The SAT scores were a bit over the top, but they did ask for "Evidence of any English language ability or qualifications," and although I taught English is France for a year, I never had to take the TOEFL exam, so my Verbal scores in the 91st percentile from 8 years ago will just have to do.

The only thing to do now is wait.  It is excruciating.  The direction of the next 2 to 5 five years of my life is in the hands of one person or several people, none of whom know anything about me, other than what I look like on paper.  According to estimated processing times (5 to 10 business days), I should hear a decision about the visa by Thursday, and according to the plane ticket I have already purchased, I should be flying to London on Saturday.  Cutting it a bit fine, am I?

In this last week of mild panic, as my work hours wind down to nothing and I am left with one final paycheck and as many superstitious rituals as I can possibly prescribe to, I turn to you, blog.  I miss writing.  I liked writing before I moved to New York (for the summer) and became obsessed with work and hours and saving enough to support my next move.  This summer has been fun and fruitful.  I did save enough to show those visa folks I'll be okay until I get a job, I have generous friends who have put me up at little to no cost, and most importantly, I've had the opportunity to spend time with good friends that I hadn't seen in years.  In the chaos of it all, I allowed myself to stop writing, to stop auditioning, and to allow my creativity to be swallowed up in my job and my admiration for the accomplishments of others.

So: this post is an exercise and a challenge to myself.  Get back on the horse.  Blog when you have time, don't just watch T.V. (I knew there was a reason I hadn't had one of those things in years).  Go to open mics.  Get back onstage.  Get an agent.  Work hard.  Have something to show for it.  Don't spend every waking moment panicking over whether or not The Powers That Be will grant you a visa.  Worrying will not affect the outcome.  Write new mantras.

The longer I am away from my blog, the harder it is to return.  Should I tell them about how I went to Melbourne for my boyfriend's brother's wedding and then to his home country of New Zealand and that his family is awesome and that I'm in love and even though we had to be apart for 7 weeks, together for 6, and then apart for 5 more I think it's all going to be okay?  Or should I just start off here, forget what I neglected, and dive in?

Dive in.

One thing leads to another.

Why is it that, when I stop writing one thing, I stop writing everything?  I stop blogging, and so I stop writing new comedy, short stories and I just generally stop writing at all.  Maybe because writing has suddenly become my job in the form of lessons about France.  I do enjoy writing them (and getting paid for it), but after an afternoon of research, voice recording and blogging for profit, I'm much less likely to stay glued to my computer to write a post of my own. 

And I'm rehearsing for a play (which is awesome), but it means I've taken on odd hours of rehearsing until 10 or 10:30, and then coming home and staying up until 1 or 2 for no particular reason, which (in turn) means I get up at 10 or 10:30, putter around the flat, and around this time (12:30, as my blog has stopped using a time stamp) I think, Hmm, maybe I should shower.  And I do eventually, then I do some work, run through my lines, and it's time for rehearsal again.

This is what I've wanted for so long: to be in a play, to be making some kind of money at writing.  Now that I'm here, however, I've grown complacent.  I haven't done a stand-up gig in weeks.  I've stopped writing and editing my own work.  I haven't thought much at all about the fact that I will be in New York for two months this summer and I want to make something of that time.  I'll be in New York, for god's sake, I need to be thinking about theater and writing and performance and where will I rehearse? and who with? and what kind of time frame will I have?

And so the questions pile up and I shut down again.  Easier to leave the questions unanswered than tackle them all at once.  And in the meantime, I'm broke.  Or as close to broke as possible when my boyfriend provides most to all living expenses and I just halfheartedly chase dreams and hope that something will come up. 

No Means Yes

I recently decided that if I ever want to actually be an artist, I need to get my act together and start making shit. For me, this means getting past the point where I have a really good idea, go to write a story or outline or script, and then immediately allow my voices of doubt to tell me that what originally seemed really cool is actually stupid and that I'll never be able to make it work. I start to write and my internal critical voice points out how obvious my jokes are and how unoriginal my premise is. My new friend* Jay was struggling with a similar problem back in Dec of 2007, and seems to be working through it again with his recent commitment to the Morning Doctrines.



Good questions Jay! And I know that cycle so well! But it's actually just really helpful to hear that I'm not the only one. Sometimes I skype up my friend Guy (master knitter and funniest person ever) just so we can lament the fact that we are not being productive enough, listen to each others' ideas, genuinely find them to be awesome, and encourage each other to write and dance and perform and generally just do the shit we talk so much about doing.

I've been trying to take inspiration anywhere I can find it. Inspiration to do, I mean, not even inspiration for what to do. Like look at this lady!


She is 83! I can't do that! But do you know what? Neither could she 50 years ago. And the reason that I know I can't do that is because in Winter 2007 I enrolled in a break-dancing class. My interest in hip hop had been growing for several years, and when I finally acted on my long desire (overcoming years of doubt/procrastination) to make some sort of a return to dancing (which I had quit at 16), I found that the studio where I worked and took modern and hip hop also offered break. After standing outside the door of class during my work study shift for the entire Fall Session, and watching how all the other awkward white women kept coming back week after week, slowly improving, I signed up for the next round.

Here's something I don't need to tell you: break-dancing is hard. I'm not talking about windmills and headspins, I just mean teaching your body to be comfortable in a constant squat and learning to do a six step without tripping over yourself and dancing in 30 second spurts 4 or 5 times in a row (freestyle was required at the end of each class) without collapsing. And I looked pretty stupid and sweaty doing it (thanks to the wall mirror for that constant reminder). But I got better. (And by the way the mirror was integral in that process.) I taught myself how to stand on my head (weeks and weeks of yoga freeze to tripod to falling over every day until I got it). I learned to do a baby freeze and side freeze, and my six step is still relatively slow, but that's probably because I haven't worked on it enough.

I can't do a cradle freeze yet (what Granny is doing there above), but I couldn't do any of that other shit before. I kept it up until the end of last summer, when I moved to France. Shockingly, the tiny town I live in has a hip hop class, and I made myself go. It wasn't really my style (a little too much Christina Aguilera, a little too little floor work) and the teacher was a pretty sleezy guy who hit on all the high school girls in the class, so I stopped going after a month or two. But I'm working on handstands now, and I should really pick up the speed on my foot work.

In a recent whirlwind of creative productivity, I wrote a 25-page first draft of a script and submitted it to the Dublin Fringe Festival with accompanying images (drawn by me!) and songs (recorded by me!) all based on an idea that I had and didn't let die! So even if Dublin doesn't want it, I have a solid jumping off point, I have project collaborators, potential rehearsal space for this summer.

There are a few important (and obvious) things that teachers and other more experienced people have told me over the past few years that I have to constantly beat into my psyche when the doubt cycle begins.

1. Never edit as you write†. I always do, and it really slows me down. Draft writing and editing are meant to be two separate steps in a process. Editing is when your critical voice is aloud and welcome, but if you let it in during the creative process, you get stiffled and spiral into doubt. Or at least I do. (Gleaned from every creative writing class ever)
   
2. No means Yes. Okay, well not exactly, and never would I say that in any other context (obvs.), but I take the idea from a teacher I had recently at a weekend workshop at the London International School of Performing Arts. He talked a lot about the voice in your head that says "No" to everything. "No, don't do that you'll look stupid," "No, that's not good enough," "No, you don't know what you're doing." What Jay would call the little hater. Every time it says No, you have to say Yes. Sometimes even outloud. Even if it makes you look like a crazy person. (Thomas, founder and head of LISPA)
   
3. Hang out with kids. Adults become creatively blocked because we've had years to develop our finely tuned level of self-consciousness, but kids are crazy. I mean, young kids. They just do and say anything and can just sit for hours and make up conversations between their toys, without caring what anyone else thinks. At least, that's what I did as a kid, but we didn't have cable. So just watch them. I mean, don't get arrested or anything, but notice how kids do things that adults think are outrageously funny without meaning to. Adults were always laughing at the things I said as a child, and it pissed me off because I didn't get it, I wasn't in on the joke. Now I wish I was still so free from self-judgment. (More advice from Thomas)
   
4. See your future. Another video courtesy of ill doctrine. KRS One is amazing.
   

So I think this post has been at least a little self-indulgent, and possibly self-congratulatory, but I needed to write it for a couple of reasons. One, writing helps me work things out. Two, if I write to everyone that I'm going to start being a more proactive artist, I hope that's just one more reason to actually do it.


*Not actually my friend. I just wish I could hang out with him and his cat.

†I don't apply this rule to my blogging as I tend to write entries in one go. This is more of a creative writing tool.